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William Faulkner is usually identified as the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century, or simply as the greatest American novelist. He was born in 1897, and died in 1962. Among his most-read and best-known novels are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom Absalom, Go Down Moses, and The Hamlet.
Most of Faulkner’s novels are set in his mythic Yoknapatawpha County, in northern Mississippi, during the early years of the twentieth century. Slavery was a thing of the not too distant past, legally, but racial segregation was still very much a part of the American way of life. Faulkner’s novels are often called “Southern,” because they are set in the South. Faulkner insisted, however, that they weren’t “Southern” novels. He wrote about the South, he said, because that was the only world he knew well enough to write about. But his novels were about the human situation, not just the Southern situation. A Lesson Before Dying is Ernest J. Gaines’ eighth novel. He was born in Louisiana in 1933, on land where his ancestors were once slaves. His family moved to California during World War II, and Gaines attended university there. Throughout much of his writing career he split his time between San Francisco and northern Louisiana. He now lives and writes in a home he built where he was born. His other novels include Of Love and Dust, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and A Gathering of Old Men.
Requirements for this seminar are good, careful, serious reading of our two novels, regular class attendance and participation, weekly in-class “scribbles,” and a seminar paper examining some topic in one or the other of our novels.
We will use the Vintage International Edition (1985 corrected text) of Faulkner’s Light in August, and the Alfred Knopf Edition (1993) of Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying. You will need these editions so that we are all on the same page during our discussions. |
